Nietzsche: The Will To Power

PREFACE

(Nov. 1887-March 1888)

1

Of what is great one must either be silent or speak with greatness. With
greatness-that means cynically and with innocence.

2

What I relate is the history of the next two centuries. I describe what is
coming, what can no longer come differently: the advent of nihilism. This
history can be related even now; for necessity itself is at work here. This
future speaks even now in a hundred signs, this destiny announces itself
everywhere; for this music of the future all ears are cocked even now. For some
time now, our whole European culture has been moving as toward a catastrophe,
with a tortured tension that is growing from decade to decade: restlessly,
violently, headlong, like a river that wants to reach the end, that no longer
reflects, that is afraid to reflect.

3

He that speaks here, conversely, has done nothing so far but reflect: a
philosopher and solitary by instinct, who has found his advantage in standing
aside and outside, in patience, in procrastination, in staying behind; as a
spirit of daring and experiment that has already lost its way once in every
labyrinth of the future; as a soothsayer-bird spirit who looks back when
relating what will come; as the first perfect nihilist of Europe who, however,
has even now lived through the whole of nihilism, to the end, leaving it behind,
outside himself.

4

For one should make no mistake about the meaning of the title that this
gospel of the future wants to bear. "The Will to Power: Attempt at a Revaluation
of All Values"-in this formulation a countermovement finds expression, regarding
both principle and task; a movement that in some future will take the place of
this perfect nihilism-but presupposes it, logically and psychologically, and
certainly can come only after and out of it. For why has the advent of nihilism
become necessary? Because the values we have had hitherto thus draw their final
consequence; because nihilism represents the ultimate logical conclusion of our
great values and ideals-because we must experience nihilism before we can find
out what value these "values" really had.-We require, sometime, new values.

BOOK ONE

EUROPEAN NIHILISM

1 (1885-1886)Toward an Outline

1. Nihilism stands at the door: whence comes this uncanniest of all guests?
Point of departure: it is an error to consider "social distress" or
"physiological degeneration" or, worse, corruption, as the cause of nihilism.
Ours is the most decent and compassionate age. Distress, whether of the soul,
body, or intellect, cannot of itself give birth to nihilism (i.e., the radical
repudiation of value, meaning, and desirability). Such distress always permits a
variety of interpretations. Rather: it is in one particular interpretation, the
Christian-moral one, that nihilism is rooted.

2. The end of Christianity-at the hands of its own morality (which cannot be
replaced), which turns against the Christian God (the sense of truthfulness,
developed highly by Christianity, is nauseated by the falseness and
mendaciousness of all Christian interpretations of the world and of history;
rebound from "God is truth" to the fanatical faith "All is false"; Buddhism of
action-).

3. Skepticism regarding morality is what is decisive. The end of the moral
interpretation of the world, which no longer has any sanction after it has tried
to escape into some beyond, leads to nihilism. "Everything lacks meaning" (the
untenability of one interpretation of the world, upon which a tremendous amount
of energy has been lavished, awakens the suspicion that all interpretations of
the world are false). Buddhistic tendency, yearning for Nothing. (Indian
Buddhism is not the culmination of a thoroughly moralistic development; its
nihilism is therefore full of morality that is not overcome: existence as
punishment, existence construed as error, error thus as a punishment-a moral
valuation.) Philosophical attempts to overcome the "moral God" (Hegel,
pantheism). Overcoming popular ideals: the sage; ~he saint; the poet. The
antagonism of "true" and "beautiful" and "good"-

4. Against "meaninglessness" on the one hand, against moral value judgments
on the other: to what extent has all science and philosophy so far been
influenced by moral judgments? and won't this net us the hostility of science?
Or an antiscientific mentality? Critique of Spinozism. Residues of Christian
value judgments are found everywhere in socialistic and positivistic systems. A
critique of Christian morality is still lacking

5. The nihilistic consequences of contemporary natural science (together with
its attempts to escape into some beyond). The industry of its pursuit eventually
leads to self-disintegration, opposition, an antiscientific mentality. Since
Copernicus man has been rolling from the center toward X.*

6. The nihilistic consequences of the ways of thinking in politics and
economics, where all "principles" are practically histrionic: the air of
mediocrity, wretchedness, dishonesty, etc. Nationalism. Anarchism, etc.
Punishment. The redeeming class and human being are lacking-the just)fiers-

7. The nihilistic consequences of historiography and of the "practical
historians," i.e., the romantics. The position of art: its position in the
modern world absolutely lacking in originality. Its decline into gloom. Goethe's
allegedly Olympian stance.

8. Art and the preparation of nihilism: romanticism (the conclusion of
Wagner's Nibelungen).

I. NIHILISM

2 (Spring-Fall 1887)

What does nihilism mean? That the highest values devaluate tiemselves. The
aim is lacking; "why?" finds no answer.

3 (Spring-Fall 1887)

Radical nihilism is the conviction of an absolute untenability of existence
when it comes to the highest values one recognizes; plus the realization that we
lack the least right to posit a beyond or an in-itself of things that might be
"divine" or morality incarnate.

This realization is a consequence of the cultivation of "truthfulness"-thus
itself a consequence of the faith in morality.

4 (June 10, 1887)3

What were the advantages of the Christian moral hypothesis?

1. It granted man an absolute value, as opposed to his smallness and
accidental occurrence in the flux of becoming and passing away.

2. It served the advocates of God insofar as it conceded to the world, in
spite of suffering and evil, the character of perfection-including "freedom":
evil appeared full of meaning.

3. It posited that man had a knowledge of absolute values and thus adequate
knowledge precisely regarding what is most important.

4. It prevented man from despising himself as man, from taking sides against
life; from despairing of knowledge: it was a means of preservation.

In sum: morality was the great antidote against practical and theoretical
nihilism.

5 (June 10, 1887)

But among the forces cultivated by morality was truthfulness: this eventually
turned against morality, discovered its teleology, its partial perspective-and
now the recognition of this inveterate mendaciousness that one despairs of
shedding becomes a stimulant. Now we discover in ourselves needs implanted by
centuries of moral interpretation-needs that now appear to us as needs for
untruth; on the other hand, the value for which we endure life seems to hinge on
these needs. This antagonism-not to esteem what we know, and not to be allowed
any longer to esteem the lies we should like to tell ourselves-results in a
process of dissolution.

6 (-Spring-Fall 1887)

This is the antinomy:

Insofar as we believe in morality we pass sentence on exist

7 (Nov. 1887-March 1888)

The supreme values in whose service man should live, especially when they
were very hard on him and exacted a high puce-these social values were erected
over man to strengthen their voice, as if they were commands of God, as
'reality," as the true" world, as a hope and future world. Now that the shabby
orlgln of these values is becoming clear, the universe seems to have lost value,
seems "meaningless"-but that is only a transitional stage.

8 (1883-1888)

The nihilistic consequence (the belief in valuelessness) as a consequence of
moral valuation: everything egoistic has come to disgust us (even though we
realize the impossibility of the unegoistic); what is necessary has come to
disgust us (even though we realize the impossibility of any liberum arbitrium or
~ntelligible freedom"). We see that we cannot reach the sphere m which we have
placed our values; but this does not by any means confer any value on that other
sphere in which we live: on the contrary, we are weary because we have lost the
ma~n stimulus "In vain so far!"

9 (Spring-Fall 1887)

Pessimism as a preliminary form of nihilism.

10 (Spring-Fall 1887)

Pessimism as strength-in what? in the energy of its logic, as anarchism and
nihilism, as analytic.

Pessimism as decline-in what? as growing effeteness, as a sort of
cosmopolitan fingering, as "tout comprendre 6 and h~storicism.

The critical tension: the extremes appear and become predominant.

11 (Spring-Fall 1887, rev. Spring-Fall 1888)

The logic of pessimism down to ultimate nihilism: what is at work in it? The
idea of valuelessness, meaninglessness: to what extent moral valuations hide
behind all other high values.

Conclusion: Moral value judgments are ways of passing sentence, negations;
morality is a way of turning one's back on the will to existence.

Problem: But what is morality?

12 (Nov. 1887-March 1888)

Decline of Cosmological Values

( A )

Nihilism as a psychological state will have to be reached, first, when we
have sought a "meaning" in all events that is not there: so the seeker
eventually becomes discouraged. Nihilism, then, is the recognition of the long
waste of strength, the agony of the "in vain," insecurity, the lack of any
opportunity to recover and to regain composure-being ashamed in front of
oneself, as if one had deceived oneself all too long.-This meaning could have
been: the "furfillment" of some highest ethical canon in all events, the moral
world order; or the growth of love and harmony in the intercourse of beings; or
the gradual approximation of a state of universal happiness; or even the
development toward a state of universal annihilation-any goal at least
constitutes some meaning. What all these notions have in common is that
something is to be achieved through the process-and now one realizes that
becoming aims at nothing and achieves nothing.- Thus, disappointment regarding
an alleged aim of becoming as a cause of nihilism: whether regarding a specific
aim or, universalized, the realization that all previous hypotheses about aims
that concern the whole "evolution" are inadequate (man no longer the
collaborator, let alone the center, of becoming).

Nihilism as a psychological state is reached, secondly, when one has posited
a totality, a systematization, indeed any organization in all events, and
underneath all events, and a soul that longs to admire and revere has wallowed
in the idea of some supreme form of domination and administration (-if the soul
be that of a logician, complete consistency and real dialectic are quite
sufficient to reconcile it to everything). Some sort of unity, some form of
"monism": this faith suffices to give man a deep feeling of standing in the
context of, and being dependent on, some whole that is infinitely superior to
him, and he sees himself as a mode of the deity.-"The well-being of the
universal demands the devotion of the individual"-but behold, there is no such
universal! At bottom, man has lost the faith in his own value when no infinitely
valuable whole works through him; i.e., he conceived such a whole in order to be
able to believe in his own value.

Nihilism as psychological state has yet a third and last form.

Given these two insights, that becoming has no goal and that underneath all
becoming there is no grand unity in which the individual could immerse himself
completely as in an element of supreme value, an escape remains: to pass
sentence on this whole world of becoming as a deception and to invent a world
beyond it, a true world. But as soon as man finds out how that world is
fabricated solely from psychological needs, and how he has absolutely no right
to it, the last form of nihilism comes into being: it includes disbelief in any
metaphysical world and forbids itself any belief in a true world.7 Having
reached this standpoint, one grants the reality of becoming as the only reality,
forbids oneself every kind of clandestine access to afterworlds and false
divinities -but cannot endure this world though one does not want to deny
it.

What has happened, at bottom? The feeling of valuelessness was reached with
the realization that the overall character of existence may not be interpreted
by means of the concept of "aim," the concept of "unity," or the concept of
"truth." Existence has no goal or end; any comprehensive unity in the plurality
of events is lacking: the character of existence is not "true," is false. One
simply lacks any reason for convincing oneself that there is a true world.
Briefly: the categories "aim," "unity," "being" which we used to project some
value into the world-we pull out again; so the world looks valueless.

( B )

Suppose we realize how the world may no longer be interpreted in terms of
these three categories, and that the world begins to become valueless for us
after this insight: then we have to ask about the sources of our faith in these
three categories. Let us try if it is not possible to give up our faith in them.
Once we have devaluated these three categories, the demonstration that they
cannot be applied to the universe is no longer any reason for devaluating the
universe.

Conclusion: The faith in the categories of reason is the cause 1; of
nihilism. We have measured the value of the world according I to categories that
refer to a purely fictitious world.

~ Final conclusion: All the values by means of which we have tried so far to
render the world estimable for ourselves and which then proved inapplicable and
therefore devaluated the world-all these values are, psychologically considered,
the results of certain perspectives of utility, designed to maintain and
increase human constructs of domination-and they have been falsely projected mto
the essence of things. What we find here is still the hyperbolic naivete of man:
positing himself as the meaning and measure of the value of things.

13 (Spring-Fall 1887)

Nihilism represents a pathological transitional stage (what is pathological
is the tremendous generalization, the inference that there is no meaning at
all): whether the productive forces are not yet strong enough, or whether
decadence still hesitates and has not yet invented its remedies.

Presupposition of this hypothesis: that there is no truth, that there is no
absolute nature of things nor a "thing- in-itself." This, too, IS merely
nihilism-even the most extreme nihilism. It places the value of things precisely
in the lack of any reality corresponding to these values and in their being
merely a symptom of strength on the part of the value-positers, a simplification
for the sake of life.

14 (Spring-Fall 1887)

Values and their changes are related to increases in the power of those
positing the values.

The measure of unbelief, of permitted "freedom of the spirit" as an
expression of an increase in power.

"Nihilism" an ideal of the highest degree of powerfulness of splrlt, the
over-richest life-partly destructive, partly ironic.

15 (Spring-Fall 1837)

What is a belief? How does it originate? Every belief is a
cons~denugffomething-true.

The most extreme form of nihilism would be the view that every be ef, every
considering-something-true, is necessarily false cause there simply is no true
world Thus. a perspectival appearance whose origin lies in us (in so far as we
continually need a narrower, abbreviated, simplified world).

-That it is the measure of strength to what extent we can admit to ourselves,
without perishing, the merely apparent character, the necessity of lies.

To this extent, nihilism, as the denial of a truthful world, of being, might
be a divine way of thinking.

16 (Nov. 1887-March 1888)

If we are "disappointed," it is at least not regarding life: rather we are
now facing up to all kinds of "desiderata."

With scornful wrath we contemplate what are called "ideals"; we despise
ourselves only because there are moments

when we cannot subdue that absurd impulse that is called "idealism." The
influence of too much coddling is stronger

than the wrath of the disappointed.

17 (Spring-Fall 1887; rev. 1888)

To what extent Schopenhauer's nihilism still follows from the same ideal that
created Christian theism.-One felt so certain about the highest desiderata, the
highest values, the highest perfection that the philosophers assumed this as an
absolute certainty, as if it were a priori: "God" at the apex as a given truth.
"To become as God," "to be absorbed into God"-for thousands of years these were
the most naive and convincing desiderata (but what convinces is not necessarily
true-it is merely convincing: a note for asses).

One has unlearned the habit of conceding to this posited ideal the reality of
a person; one has become atheistic. But has the ideal itself been renounced?-At
bottom, the last metaphysicians still seek in it true "reality," the "thing-
in-itself" compared to which everything else is merely apparent. It is their
dogma that our apparent world, being so plainly not the expression of this
ideal, cannot be "true"-and that, at bottom, it does not even lead us back to
that metaphysical world as its cause. The unconditional, representing that
highest perfection, cannot possibly be the ground of all that is conditional.
Schopenhauer wanted it otherwise and therefore had to conceive of this
metaphysical ground as the opposite of the ideal-as "evil, blind will": that way
it could be that "which appears," that which reveals itself in the world of
appearances. But even so he did not renounce the absoluteness of the ideal-he
sneaked by.-

(Kant considered the hypothesis of "intelligible freedom" necessary in order
to acquit the ens perfection of responsibility for the world's being
such-and-such-in short, to account for evil and ills: a scandalous bit of logic
for a philosopher.-)

18 (1883-1888)

The most universal sign of the modern age: man has lost dignity in his own
eyes to an incredible extent. For a long time the center and tragic hero of
existence in general; then at least intent on proving himself closely related to
the decisive and essentially valuable side of existence-like all metaphysicians
who wish to cling to the dignity of man, with their faith that moral values are
cardinal values. Those who have abandoned God cling that much more firmly to the
faith in morality.

19 (1883-1888)

Every purely moral value system (that of Buddhism, for example) ends in
nihilism: this to be expected in Europe. One still hopes to get along with a
moralism without religious background: but that necessarily leads to
nihilism.-In religion the constraint is lacking to consider ourselves as
value-positing.

20 (Spring-Fall 1887)

The nihilistic question "for what?" is rooted in the old habit of supposing
that the goal must be put up, given, demanded from outside-by some superhuman
authority. Having unlearned faith in that, one still follows the old habit and
seeks another authority that can speak unconditionally and command goals and
tasks. The authority of conscience now steps up front (the more emancipated one
is from theology, the more imperativistic morality becomes) to compensate for
the loss of a personal authority. Or the authority of reason. Or the social
instinct (the herd). Or history with an immanent spirit and a goal within, so
one can entrust oneself to it. One wants to get around the will, the willing of
a goal, the risk of positing a goal for oneself; one wants to rid oneself of the
responsibility (one would accept fatalism). Finally, happiness-and, with a touch
of Tartuffe, the happiness of the greatest number.

One says to oneself:

1. a definite goal is not necessary at all,

2. cannot possibly be anticipated.

Just now when the greatest strength of will would be necessary, it is weakest
and least confident. Absolute mistrust regarding the organizing strength of the
will for the whole.

21 (Spring-Fall 1887; rev. 1888)

The perfect nihilist.-The nihilist's eye idealizes in the direction of
ugliness and is unfaithful to his memories: it allows them to drop, lose their
leaves; it does not guard them against the corpselike pallor that weakness pours
out over what is distant and gone. And what he does not do for himself, he also
does not do for the whole past of mankind: he lets it drop.

22 (Spring-Fall 1887)

Nihilism. It is ambiguous:

A. Nihilism as a sign of increased power of the spirit: as active
nihilism.

B. Nihilism as decline and recession of the power of the spirit: as passive
nihilism.

23 (Spring-Fall 1887)18

Nihilism as a normal condition.

It can be a sign of strength: the spirit may have grown so strong that
previous goals ("convictions," articles of faith) have become incommensurate
(for a faith generally expresses the constraint of conditions of existence,
submission to the authority of circumstances under which one flourishes, grows,
gains power). Or a sign of the lack of strength to posit for oneself,
productively, a goal, a why, a faith.

It reaches its maximum of relative strength as a violent force of
destruction-as active nihilism.

Its opposite: the weary nihilism that no longer attacks; its most famous
form, Buddhism; a passive nihilism, a sign of weakness. The strength of the
spirit may be worn out, exhausted, so that previous goals and values have become
incommensurate and no longer are believed; so that the synthesis of values and
goals (on which every strong culture rests) dissolves and the individual values
war against each other: disintegration-and whatever refreshes, heals, calms,
numbs emerges into the foreground in various disguises, religious or moral, or
political, or aesthetic, etc.

24 (Nov. 1887-March 1888)

Nihilism does not only contemplate the "in vain!" nor is it merely the belief
that everything deserves to perish: one helps to destroy.-This is, if you will,
illogical; but the nihilist does not believe that one needs to be logical.-It is
the condition of strong spirits and wills, and these do not find it possible to
stop with the No of "judgment": their nature demands the No of the deed. The
reduction to nothing by judgment is seconded by the reduction to nothing by
hand.

25 (Spring-Fall 1887)

On the genesis of the nihilist.-It is only late that one musters the courage
for what one really knows.'. That I have hitherto been a thorough-going
nihilist, I have admitted to myself only recently: the energy and radicalism
with which I advanced as a nihilist deceived me about this basic fact. When one
moves toward a goal it seems impossible that "goal-lessness as such" is the
principle of our faith.

26 (Spring-Fall 1887)

The pessimism of active energy: the question "for what?" after a terrible
struggle, even victory. That something is a hundred times more important than
the question of whether we feel well or not: basic instinct of all strong
natures-and consequently also whether others feel well or not. In sum, that we
have a goal for which one does not hesitate to offer human sacrifices, to risk
every danger, to take upon oneself whatever is bad and worst: the great
passion.

27 (Spring-Fall 1887)

Causes of nihilism: 1. The higher species is lacking, i.e., those whose
inexhaustible fertility and power keep up the faith in man. (One should recall
what one owes to Napoleon: almost all of the higher hopes of this century.)

2. The lower species ("herd," "mass," "society") unlearns modesty and blows
up its needs into cosmic and metaphysical values. In this way the whole of
existence is vulgarized: in so far as the mass is dominant it bullies the
exceptions, so they lose their faith in themselves and become nihilists.

All attempts to think up higher types failed ("romanticism"; the artist, the
philosopher; against Carlyle's attempt to ascribe to them the highest moral
values).

The resistance to higher types as a result.

Decline and insecurity of all higher types. The fight against the genius
("folk poetry," etc.). Pity for the lowly and suffering as a measure for the
height of a soul.

The philosopher is lacking who interprets the deed and does not merely
transpose it.

28 (Spring-Fall 1887)

Main proposition. How complete nihilism is the necessary consequence of the
ideals entertained hitherto.

Incomplete nihilism; its forms: we live in the midst of it.

Attempts to escape nihilism without revaluating our values so far: they
produce the opposite, make the problem more acute.

29 (1883-1888)

The ways of self-narcotization._ 16 Deep down: not knowing whither.
Emptiness. Attempt to get over it by intoxication intoxication as music;
intoxication as cruelty in the tragic enjoy ment of the destruction of the
noblest; intoxication as blind enthusiasm for single human beings or ages (as
hatred, etc.).-Attempt to work blindly as an instrument of science: opening
one's eyes to the many small enjoyments; e.g., also in the quest of knowledge
(modesty toward oneself); resignation to generalizing about oneself, a pathos;
mysticism, the voluptuous enjoyment of eternal emptiness; art "for its own sake"
("le fait") and "pure knowledge" as narcotic states of disgust with oneself;
some kind or other of continual work, or of some stupid little fanaticism; a
medley of all means, sickness owing to general immoderation (debauchery kills
enjoyment).

1. Weakness of the will as a result.

2. Extreme pride and the humiliation of petty weakness felt in contrast.

30 (Nov. 1887-March 1888; rev. 1888)

The time has come when we have to pay for having been Christians for two
thousand years: we are losing the center of gravity by virtue of which we lived;
we are lost for a while. Abruptly we plunge into the opposite valuations, with
all the energy that such an extreme overvaluation of man has generated in
man.

Now everything is false through and through, mere "words," chaotic, weak, or
extravagant:

a. one attempts a kind of this-worldly solution, but in the same sense-that
of the eventual triumph of truth, love, and justice (socialism: "equality of the
person");

b. one also tries to hold on to the moral ideal (with the pre-eminence of
what is un-egoistic, self-denial, negation of the win);

c. one tries to hold on even to the "beyond"-even if only as some antilogical
"x,'-but one immediately interprets it in such a way that some sort of
old-fashioned metaphysical comfort can be derived from it;

d. one tries to find in events an old-fashioned divine governance-an order of
things that rewards, punishes, educates, and betters;

e. one still believes in good and evil and experiences the triumph of the
good and the annihilation of evil as a task (that is English; typical case: the
flathead John Stuart Mill);

f. contempt for what is "natural," for desire, for the ego: attempt to
understand even the highest spirituality and art as the consequence of
depersonalization and as desinteressement;

g. the church is still permitted to obtrude into all important experiences
and main points of individual life to hallow

them and give them a higher meaning: we still have the "Christian state,"
"Christian marriage"

31 (1884)

There have been more thoughtful and thought-addicted ages than ours: ages,
e.g., like that in which the Buddha appeared, when after centuries of quarrels
among sects the people themselves were as deeply lost in the ravines of
philosophic doctrines as European nations were at times in the subtleties of
religious dogmas. Surely, one should not let "literature" and the press seduce
us to think well of the "spirit" of our time: the existence of millions of
spiritists and a Christianity that goes in for gymnastics of that gruesome
ugliness that characterizes all English inventions are more instructive.

European pessimism is still in its early stages-bears witness against itself:
it still lacks that tremendous, yearning rigidity of expression in which the
Nothing is reflected, once found in India; it is still far too contrived and too
little "organic"-too much a pessimism of scholars and poets: I mean, much of it
is excogitated and invented, is "created" and not a "cause."

32 (Summer-Fall 1888)

Critique of pessimism to date.-Resistance to eudaemonistic considerations as
the last reduction to the question: what does it mean? The reduction of growing
gloom.-

Our pessimism: the world does not have the value we thought it had. Our faith
itself has so increased our desire for knowledge that today we have to say this.
Initial result: it seems worth less; that is how it is experienced initially. It
is only in this sense that we are pessimists; i.e., in our determination to
admit this revaluation to ourselves without any reservation, and to stop telling
ourselves tales-lies-the old way.

That is precisely how we find the pathos that impels us to seek new values.
In sum: the world might be far more valuable than we used to believe; we must
see through the naivete of our ideals, and while we thought that we accorded it
the highest interpretation, we may not even have given our human existence a
moderately fair value.

What has been de)fied? The value instincts in the community (that which made
possible its continued existence).

What has been slandered? That which set apart the higher men from the lower,
the desires that create clefts.

33 (Spring-Fall 1887)

Causes of the advent of pessimism:

1. that the most powerful desires of life that have the most future have
hitherto been slandered, so a curse weighs on life;

2. that the growing courage and integrity and the bolder mistrust that now
characterize man comprehend that these instincts are inseparable from life, and
one therefore turns against life;

3. that only the most mediocre, who have no feeling at all for this conflict,
flourish while the higher kind miscarries and, as a product of degeneration,
invites antipathy-that the mediocre on the other hand, when they pose as the
goal and meaning, arouse indignation (that nobody is able any more to answer any
"for

4. that diminution, sensitivity to pain, restlessness, haste, and hustling
grow continually-that it becomes easier and easier to recognize this whole
commotion, this so-called "civilization," and that the individual, faced with
this tremendous machinery, loses courage and submits.

34 (1&35-1886)

Modern pessimism is an expression of the uselessness of the modern world-not
of the world of existence.

35 (Spring-Fall 1887)

The "predominance of suffering over pleasure" or the opposite (hedonism):
these two doctrines are already signposts to nihilism.

For in both of these cases no ultimate meaning is posited except the
appearance of pleasure or displeasure.

But that is how a kind of man speaks that no longer dares to posit a will, a
purpose, a meaning: for any- healthier kind of man the value of life is
certainly not measured by the standard of these trifles. And suffering might
predominate, and m cnite of that a powerful will might exist, a Yes to life, a
need for thus predominance.

"Life is not worthwhile"; "resignation"; "why the tears?- a weakly and
sentimental way of thinking. "Un monstre gai vaut mieux qu'un sentimental
ennuyeux.

36 (Nov. 1887-March 1888)

The philosophical nihilist is convinced that all that happens is meaningless
and in vain; and that there ought not to be anything meaningless and in vain.
But whence this: there ought not to be, From where does one get this "meaning,"
this standard?- At bottom, the nihilist thinks that the sight of such a bleak,
useless existence makes a philosopher feel dissatisfied, bleak, desperate. Such
an insight goes against our finer sensibility as philosophers. It amounts to the
absurd valuation: to have any right to be, the character of existence would have
to give the philosopher pleasure.-

Now it is easy to see that pleasure and displeasure can only be means in the
course of events: the question remains whether we are at all able to see the
"meaning," the "aim," whether the question of meaninglessness or its opposite is
not insoluble for us.-

37 (Spring-Fall 1887)

The development of pessimism into nihilism.-Denaturalization of values.
Scholasticism of values. Detached and idealistic, values, instead of dominating
and guiding action, turn against action and condemn it.

Opposites replace natural degrees and ranks. Hatred against the order of
rank. Opposites suit a plebeian age because easier to comprehend.

The repudiated world versus an artificiaUy built "true, valuable"
one.-Finally: one discovers of what material one has built the "true world": and
now all one has left is the repudiated world, and one adds this supreme
disappointment to the reasons why it deserves to be repudiated.

At this point nihilism is reached: all one has left are the values that pass
judgment-nothing else.

Here the problem of strength and weakness originates:

1. The weak perish of it;

2. those who are stronger destroy what does not perish;

3. those who are strongest overcome the values that pass judgment.

In sum this constitutes the tragic age.

38 (1883-1888)

Recently much mischief has been done with an accidental and in every way
unsuitable word: everywhere "pessimism" is discussed, and the question is
debated whether pessmism or optimism is right, as if there must be answers to
that.

One fails to see, although it could hardly be more obvious, that pessimism is
not a problem but a symptom, that the name should be replaced by "nihilism,"
that the question whether notto-be is better than to be is itself a disease, a
sign of decline, an idiosyncrasy.

The nihilistic movement is merely the expression of physiological
decadence.

39 (Nov. 1887-March 1888)

To be comprehended: That every kind of decay and sickness has continually
helped to form overall value judgments; that decadence has actually gained
predominance in the value judgments that have become accepted; that we not only
have to fight against the consequences of all present misery of degeneration,
but that all previous decadence is still residual, i.e., survives. Such a total
aberration of mankind from its basic instincts, such a total decadence of value
judgments-that is the question mark par excellence, the real riddle that the
animal "man" poses for the philosopher.

40 (March-June 1888)

The concept of decadence.-Waste, decay, elimination need not be condemned:
they are necessary consequences of life, of the growth of life. The phenomenon
of decadence is as necessary as any increase and advance of life: one is in no
position to abolish it. Reason demands, on the contrary, that we do justice to
it.

It is a disgrace for all socialist systematizers that they suppose there
could be circumstances-social combinations-in which vice, disease, prostitution,
distress would no longer grow.-But that means condemning life.-A society is not
free to remain young. And even at the height of its strength it has to form
refuse and waste materials. The more energetically and boldly it advances, the
richer it will be in failures and deformities, the closer to decline.-Age is not
abolished by means of institutions. Neither is disease. Nor vice.

41 (Jan.-Fall 1888)

Basic insight regarding the nature of decadence: its supposed causes are~ its
consequences.

This changes the whole perspective of moral problems.

The whole moral struggle against vice, luxury, crime, even disease, appears a
naivete and superfluous: there is no "improvement" (against repentance).

Decadence itself is nothing to be fought: it is absolutely necessary and
belongs to every age and every people. What should be fought vigorously is the
contagion of the healthy parts of the organism.

Is this being done? The opposite is done. Precisely that is attempted in the
name of humanity.

-How are the supreme values held so far, related to this basic biological
question? Philosophy, religion, morality, art, etc.

(The cure: e.g., militarism, beginning with Napoleon who considered
civilization his natural enemy.)lu

42 (March-June 1888)

First principle:

The supposed causes of degeneration are its consequences.

But the supposed remedies of degeneration are also mere palliatives against
some of its effects: the "cured" are merely one type of the degenerates.

1. Skepticism is a consequence of decadence, as is libertinism of the
spirit.

2. The corruption of morals is a consequence of decadence (weakness of the
will, need for strong stimuli).

3. Attempted cures, psychological and moral, do not change the course of
decadence, do not arrest it, are physiologically naught:

Insight into the great nullity of these presumptuous "reactions"; they are
forms of narcotization against certain terrible consequences; they do not
eliminate the morbid element; often they are heroic attempts to annul the man of
decadence and to realize the minimum of his harmfulness.

4. Nihilism is no cause but merely the logical result of decadence.

5. The "good" and "bad" man are merely two types of decadence: in all basic
phenomena they agree.

6. The social question is a consequence of decadence.

7. Sicknesses, especially those affecting nerves and head, are signs that the
defensive strength of the strong natures is lacking; precisely this is suggested
by irritability, so pleasure and displeasure become foreground problems.

44 (Spring-Summer 1888)

Most general types of decadence:

1. Believing one chooses remedies, one chooses in fact that which hastens
exhaustion; Christianity is an example (to name the greatest example of such an
aberration of the instincts); "progress" is another instance.-

2. One loses one's power of resistance against stimuli-and comes to be at the
mercy of accidents: one coarsens and enlarges one's experiences
tremendously-"depersonalization," disintegration of the will; example: one whole
type of morality, the altruistic one which talks much of pity-and is
distinguished by the weakness of the personality, so that it is sounded, too, 21
and like an overstimulated string vibrates continually-an extreme
irritability.-

3. One confuses cause and effect: one fails to understand decadence as a
physiological condition and mistakes its consequences for the real cause of the
indisposition; example: all of religious morality.-

4. One longs for a condition in which one no longer suffers: life is actually
experienced as the ground of ills; one esteems unconscious states, without
feeling, (sleep, fainting) as incomparably more valuable than conscious ones;
from this a method-

45 (March-June 1888)

On the hygiene of the "weak."-Everything done in weakness fails. Moral: do
nothing. Only there is the hitch that precisely the strength to suspend
activity, not to react, is sickest of all under the influence of weakness: one
never reacts more quickly and blindly than when one should not react at
all.-

A strong nature manifests itself by waiting and postponing any reaction: it
is as much characterized by a certain adiaphoria as weakness is by an
involuntary countermovement and the suddenness and inevitability of "action."-
The will is weak- and the prescription to avoid stupidities would be to have a
strong will and to do nothing.-Contradictio.-A kind of self- destruction; the
instinct of preservation is compromised.-The weak harm themselves.-That is the
type of decadence.-

In fact, we find a tremendous amount of reflection about practices that would
lead to impassability. The instinct is on the right track insofar as doing
nothing is more expedient than doing something.-

All the practices of the orders, the solitary philosophers, the fakirs are
inspired by the right value standard that a certain kind of man cannot benefit
himself more than by preventing himself as much as possible from acting.-

Means of relief: absolute obedience, machinelike activity, avoidance of
people and things that would demand instant decisions and actions.

46 (March-June 1888)

Weakness of the will: that is a metaphor that can prove misleading. For there
is no will, and consequently neither a strong nor a weak will. The multitude and
disgregation of impulses and the lack of any systematic order among them result
in a "weak will"; their coordination under a single predominant impulse results
in a "strong will": in the first case it is the oscillation and the lack of
gravity; in the latter, the precision and clarity of the direction.

47 (March-lune 1888)

What is inherited is not the sickness but sickliness: the lack of strength to
resist the danger of infections, etc., the broken resistance; morally speaking,
resignation and meekness in face of the enemy.

I have asked myself if all the supreme values of previous philosophy,
morality, and religion could not be compared to the values of the weakened, the
mentally ill, and neurasthenics: in a milder form, they represent the same
ills.-

It is the value of all morbid states that they show us under a magnifying
glass certain states that are normal-but not easily visible when normal.-

Health and sickness are not essentially different, as the ancient physicians
and some practitioners even today suppose. One must not make of them distinct
principles or entities that fight over the living organism and turn it into
their arena. That is silly nonsense and chatter that is no good any longer. In
fact, there are only differences in degree between these two kinds of existence:
the exaggeration, the disproportion, the nonharmony of the normal phenomena
constitute the pathological state (Claude Bernard).

Just as "evil" can be considered as exaggeration, disharmony, disproportion,
"the good" may be a protective diet against the danger of exaggeration,
disharmony, and disproportion.

Hereditary weakness as the dominant feeling: cause of the supreme values.

N.B. One wants weakness: why? Usually because one is necessarily weak.

-Weakness as a task: weakening the desires, the feelings of pleasure and
displeasure, the will to power, to a sense of pride, to want to have and have
more; weakening as meekness; weakening as faith; weakening as aversion and shame
in the face of everything natural, as negation of life, as sickness and habitual
weakness-weakening as the renunciation of revenge, of resistance, of enmity and
wrath.

The error in treatment: one does not want to fight weakness with a systeme
fortifiant, but rather with a kind of just)fication and moralization; i.e., with
an interpretation.-

-Two totally different states confounded: e.g., the calm of strength, which
is essentially forbearance from reaction (type of the gods whom nothing
moves)-and the calm of exhaustion,. rigidity to the point of anesthesia. All
philosophic-ascetic procedures aim at the second, but really intend the
former-for they attribute predicates to the attained state as if a divine state
had been attained.

48 (March-lune 1888)

The most dangerous misunderstanding.-One concept apparently permits no
confusion or ambiguity: that of exhaustion. Exhaustion can be acquired or
inherited-in any case it changes the aspect of things, the value of things.-

As opposed to those who, from the fullness they represent and feel,
involuntarily give to things and see them fuller, more powerful, and pregnant
with future-who at least are able to bestow something-the exhausted diminish and
botch all they see-they impoverish the value: they are harmful.-

About this no mistake seems possible: yet history contains the gruesome fact
that the exhausted have always been mistaken for the fullest-and the fullest for
the most harmful.

Those poor in life, the weak, impoverish life; those rich in life, the
strong, enrich it. The first are parasites of life; the second give presents to
it.-How is it possible to confound these two?

When the exhausted appeared with the gesture of the highest activity and
energy (when degeneration effected an excess of spiritual and nervous
discharge), they were mistaken for the rich. They excited fear.-The cult of the
fool is always the cult of those rich in life, the powerful. The fanatic, the
possessed, the religious epileptic, all eccentrics have been experienced as the
highest types of power: as divine.

This kind of strength that excites fear was considered preeminently divine:
here was the origin of authority; here one interpreted, heard, sought
wisdom.-This led to the development, almost everywhere, of a will to "deify,"
i.e., a will to the typical degeneration of spirit, body, and nerves: an attempt
to find the way to this higher level of being. To make oneself sick, mad, to
provoke the symptoms of derangement and ruin-that was taken for becoming
stronger, more superhuman, more terrible, wiser. One thought that in this way
one became so rich in power that one could give from one's fullness. Wherever
one adored one sought one who could give.

Here the experience of intoxication proved misleading. This increases the
feeling of power in the highest degree-therefore, naively judged, power itself.
On the highest rung of power one placed the most intoxicated, the ecstatic.
(-There are two sources of intoxication: the over-great fullness of life and a
state of pathological nourishment of the brain.)

49 (Jan.-Fall 1888)

Acquired, not inherited, exhaustion: (1) Inadequate nourishment, often from
ignorance about norishment; e.g., among scholars. (2) Erotic precociousness: the
curse in particular of French youth, above all in Paris, who emerge into the
world from their Iycees botched and soiled and never free themselves again from
the chain of contemptible inclinations, ironical and disdainful toward
themselves-galley slaves with all refinements (incidentally, in most cases
already a symptom of the decadence of race and family, like all
hypersensitivity; also the contagion of the milieu-to let oneself be determined
by one's environment is decadent). (3) Alcoholism-not the instinct but the
habit, the stupid imitation, the cowardly or vain assimilation to a dominant
regime:

What a blessing a Jew is among Germans! How much dullness, how blond the
head, how blue the eye; the lack of esprit in face, word, posture; the lazy
stretching-oneself, the German need for a good rest-not prompted by overwork but
by the disgusting stimulation and overstimulation through alcoholica.-

50 (1888)

Theory of exhaustion.-Vice, the mentally ill (resp., the artists-), the
criminals, the anarchists-these are not the oppressed classes but the scum of
previous society of all classes.-

Realizing that all our classes are permeated by these elements, we understand
that modern society is no "society," no "body," but a sick conglomerate of
chandalas-a society that no longer has the strength to excrete.

To what extent sickliness, owing to the symbiosis of centuries,

goes much deeper:

modern virtue,=

modern spirituality, = as forms of sickness.

Our science =

51 (March-June 1888)

The state of corruption.-To understand how all forms of corruption belong
together, without forgetting the Christian corruption (Pascal as type) as well
as the socialist-communist corruption (a consequence of the Christian-from the
point of view of the natural sciences, the socialists' conception of the highest
society is the lowest in the order of rank); also the "beyond" corruption: as if
outside the actual world, that of becoming, there were another world of
being.

Here no terms are permissible: here one has to eradicate, annihilate, wage
war; everywhere the Christian-nihilistic value standard still has to be pulled
up and fought under every mask; e.g., in present-day sociology, in present-day
music, in present-day pessimism (all of them forms of the Christian value
ideal).

Either the one is true or the other: true here means elevating the type of
man.

The priest, the shepherd of souls, as objectionable forms of existence. All
of education to date, helpless, untenable, without center of gravity, stained by
the contradiction of values.

52 (Jan.-Fall 1888)

Nature is not immoral when it has no pity for the degenerate: on the
contrary, the growth of physiological and moral ills among mankind is the
consequence of a pathological and unnatural morality. The sensibility of the
majority of men is pathological and unnatural.

Why is it that mankind is corrupt morally and physiologically?-The body
perishes when an organ is altered. The right of altruism cannot be derived from
physiology; nor can the right to help and to an equality of lots: these are
prizes for the degenerate and underprivileged.

There is no solidarity in a society in which there are sterile, unproductive,
and destructive elements-which, incidentally? will have descendants even more
degenerate than they are themselves.

53 (March-June 1888)

Even the ideals of science can be deeply, yet completely unconsciously
influenced by decadence: our entire sociology is proof of that. The objection to
it is that from experience it knows only the form of the decay of society, and
inevitably it takes its own instincts of decay for the norms of sociological
judgment.

In these norms the life that is declining in present-day Europe formulates
its social ideals: one cannot tell them from the ideals of old races that have
outlived themselves.-

The herd instinct, then-a power that has now become sovereign-is something
totally different from the instinct of an aristocratic society: and the value of
the units determines the significance of the sum.-Our entire sociology simply
does not know any other instinct than that of the herd, i.e., that of the sum of
zeroes-where every zero has "equal rights," where it is virtuous to be
zero.-

The valuation that is today applied to the different forms of society is
entirely identical with that which assigns a higher value to peace than to war:
but this judgment is antibiological, is itself a fruit of the decadence of
life.-Life is a consequence of war, society itself a means to war.-As a
biologist, Mr. Herbert Spencer is a decadent; as a moralist, too (he considers
the triumph of altruism a desideratum! ! !).

54 (Jan.-Fall 1888)

It is my good fortune that after whole millennia of error and confusion I
have rediscovered the way that leads to a Yes and a No.

I teach the No to all that makes weak-that exhausts.

I teach the Yes to all that strengthens, that stores up strength, that
just)fies the feeling of strength.

So far one has taught neither the one nor the other: virtue has been taught,
mortification of the self, pity, even the negation of life. All these are the
values of the exhausted.

Prolonged reflection on the physiology of exhaustion forced me to ask to what
extent the judgments of the exhausted had penetrated the world of values.

My result was as surprising as possible, even for me who was at home in many
a strange world: I found that all of the supreme value judgments-all that have
come to dominate mankind, at least that part that has become tame-can be derived
from the judgments of the exhausted.

Under the holiest names I pulled up destructive tendencies; one has called
God what weakens, teaches weakness, infects with weakness.-I found that the
"good man" is one of the forms in which decadence aflirms itself.

That virtue of which Schopenhauer still taught that it is the supreme, the
only virtue, and the basis of all virtues-precisely pity I recognized as more
dangerous than any vice. To cross as a matter of principle selection in the
species and its purlfication of refuse-that has so far been called virtue par
excellence.-

One should respect fatality-that fatality that says to the weak: perish!-

One has called it God-that one resisted fatality, that one corrupted mankind
and made it rot.-One should not use the name of God in vain.-

The race is corrupted-not by its vices but by its ignorance; it is corrupted
because it did not recognize exhaustion as exhaustion: mistakes about
physiological states are the source of all ills.-

Virtue is our greatest misunderstanding.

Problem: How did the exhausted come to make the laws about values? Put
differently: How did those come to power who are the last.,-How did the instinct
of the human animal come to stand on its head?-

55 (June 10, 1887)31

Extreme positions are not succeeded by moderate ones but by extreme positions
of the opposite kind. Thus the belief in the absolute immorality of nature, in
aim- and meaninglessness, is the psychologically necessary affect once the
belief in God and an essentially moral order becomes untenable. Nihilism appears
at that point, not that the displeasure at existence has become greater than
before but because one has come to mistrust any "meaning" in suffering, indeed
in existence. One interpretation has collapsed; but because it was considered
the interpretation it now seems as if there were no meaning at all in existence,
as if everything were in vain.

That this "in vain" constitutes the character of present-day nihilism remains
to be shown. The mistrust of our previous valuations grows until it becomes the
question: "Are not all 'values' lures that draw out the comedy without bringing
it closer to a solution?" Duration "in vain," without end or aim, is the most
paralyzing idea, particularly when one understands that one is being fooled and
yet lacks the power not to be fooled.

Let us think this thought in its most terrible form: existence as it is,
without meaning or aim, yet recurring inevitably without any finale of
nothingness: "the eternal recurrence." This is the most extreme form of
nihilism: the nothing (the "meaningless"), eternally!

The European form of Buddhism: the energy of knowledge and strength compels
this belief. It is the most scientifiic of all possible hypotheses. We deny end
goals: if existence had one it would have to have been reached.

So one understands that an antithesis to pantheism is attempted here: for
"everything perfect, divine, eternal" also compels a faith in the "eternal
recurrence." Question: does morality make impossible *is pantheistic affirmation
of all things, too? At bottom, it is only the moral god that has been overcome.
Does it make sense to conceive a god "beyond good and evil"? Would a pantheism
in *is sense be possible? Can we remove the idea of a goal from the process and
then affirm the process in spite of this?-This would be *e case if something
were attained at every moment within this process-and always the same. Spinoza
reached such an affirmative position in so far as every moment has a logical
necessity, and WIU1 his basic instinct, which was logical, he felt a sense of
triumph that the world should be constituted that way.

But his case is only a single case. Every basic character trait that is
encountered at the bottom of every event, *at finds expression in every event,
would have to lead every individual who experienced it as his own basic
character trait to welcome every moment of universal existence with a sense of
triumph. The crucial point would be that one experienced this basic character
trait in oneself as good, valuable-with pleasure.

It was morality that protected life against despair and the leap into
nothing, among men and classes who were violated and oppressed by men: for it is
the experience of being powerless against men, not against nature, that
generates the most desperate embitterment against existence. Morality treated
the violent despots, the doers of violence, the "masters" in general as the
enemies against whom the common man must be protected, which means first of all
encouraged and strengthened. Morality consequently taught men to hate and
despise most profoundly what is the basic character trait of those who rule:
their will to power. To abolish, deny, and dissolve *is morality-that would mean
looking at the best-hated drive with an opposite feeling and valuation. If the
suffering and oppressed lost the faith that they have the right to despise *e
will to power, they would enter the phase of hopeless despair. This would be the
case if this trait were essential to life and it could be shown that even in
this will to morality this very "will to power" were hidden, and even this
hatred and contempt were still a will to power. The oppressed would come to see
that they were on the same plain with the oppressors, without prerogative,
without higher rank.

Rather the opposite! There is nothing to life that has value, except the
degree of power-assuming that life itself is the will to power. Morality guarded
*e underprivileged against nihilism by assigning to each an infinite value, a
metaphysical value, and by placing each in an order that did not agree with the
worldly order of rank and power: it taught resignation, meekness, etc. Supposipg
that the faith in this morality would perish, then the underprivileged would no
longer have their comfort-and they would perish.

This perishing takes the form of self-destruction-the instinctive selection
of *at which must destroy. Symptoms of this selfdestruction of the
underprivileged: self-vivisection, poisoning, intoxication, romanticism, above
all *e instinctive need for actions *at turn the powerful into mortal enemies
(as it were, one breeds one's own hangmen); the will to destruction as the will
of a still deeper instinct, *e instinct of self-destruction, the will for
nothingness.

Nihilism as a symptom that the underprivileged have no comfort left; that
they destroy in order to be destroyed; that without morality they no longer have
any reason to "resign themselves" -that they place themselves on the plain of
the opposite principle and also want power by compelling the powerful to become
their hangmen. This is the European form of Buddhism~toing No after all
existence has lost its "meaning."

It is not that "distress" has grown: on the contrary. "God, morality,
resignation," were remedies on terribly low rungs of misery: active nihilism
appears in relatively much more favorable conditions. The feeling that morality
has been overcome presupposes a fair degree of spiritual culture, and this in
turn that one is relatively well off. A certain spiritual weariness that, owing
to the long fight of philosophical opinions, has reached the most hopeless
skepticism regarding all philosophy, is another sign of the by no means low
position of these nihilists. Consider the situation in which the Buddha
appeared. The doctrine of the eternal recurrence would have scholarly
presuppositions (as did the Buddha's doctrine; e.g., the concept of causality,
etc.).

*

What does "underprivileged" mean? Above all, physiologically-no longer
politically. The unhealthiest kind of man in Europe (in all classes) furnishes
the soil for this nihilism: they will experience the belief in the eternal
recurrence as a curse, struck by which one no longer shrinks from any action;
not to be extinguished passively but to extinguish everything that is so aim-
and meaningless, although this is a mere convulsion, a blind rage at the insight
that everything has been for eternities-even this moment of nihilism and lust
for destruction.-It is the value of such a crisis that it purlfies, that it
pushes together related elements to perish of each other, that it assigns common
tasks to men who have opposite ways of thinking-and it also brings to light the
weaker and less secure among them and thus promotes an order of rank according
to strength, from the point of view of health: those who command are recognized
as those who command, those who obey as those who obey. Of course, outside every
existing social order.

*

Who will prove to be the strongest in the course of this? The most moderate;
those who do not require any extreme articles of faith; those who not only
concede but love a fair amount of accidents and nonsense; those who can think of
man with a considerable reduction of his value without becoming small and weak
on that account: those richest in health who are equal to most misfortunes and
therefore not so afraid of misfortunes-human beings who are sure of their power
and represent the attained strength of humanity with conscious pride.

*

How would such a human being even think of the eternal recurrence?

56 (Nov. 1887-March 1888)

- Periods of European Nihilism

The period of unclarity, of all kinds of tentative men who would conserve the
old without letting go of the new.

The period of clarity: one understands that the old and the new are basically
opposite, the old values born of declining and the new ones of ascending
life-that all the old ideals are hostile to life (born of decadence and agents
of decadence, even if in the magnificent Sunday clothes of morality). We
understand the old and are far from strong enough for something new.

The period of the three great affects: contempt, pity, destruction.

The period of catastrophe: the advent of a doctrine that sifts men-driving
the weak to decisions, and the strong as well-

II. HISTORY OF

EUROPEAN NIHILISM

57 (1884)

My friends, it was hard for us when we were young: we suffered youth itself
like a serious sickness. That is due to the time into which we have been
thrown33-a time of extensive inner decay and disintegration, a time that with
all its weaknesses, and even with its best strength, opposes the spirit of
youth. Disintegration characterizes this time, and thus uncertainty: nothing
stands firmly on its feet or on a hard faith in itself; one lives for tomorrow,
as the day after tomorrow is dubious. Everything on our way is slippery and
dangerous, and the ice that still supports us has become thin: all of us feel
the warm, uncanny breath of the thawing wind;35 where we still walk, soon no one
will be able to walk.

58 (1885-1888)

If this is not an age of decay and declining vitality, it is at least one of
headlong and arbitrary experimentation:-and it is probable that a superabundance
of bungled experiments should create an overall impression as of decay-and
perhaps even decay itself.

59 (1885-1886)

Toward a History of the Modern Eclipse

The state nomads (civil servants, etc.): without home. The decline of the
family. The "good man" as a symptom of exhaustion. Justice as will to power
(breeding).

Lasciviousness and neurosis. Black music: whither refreshing music? The
anarchist. Contempt for man, nausea. Deepest difference: whether hunger or
overabundance becomes creative? The former generates the ideals of
romanticism.37 Nordic unnaturalness. The need for alcoholica: the "distress" of
the workers. Philosophical nihilism.

60 (1885)

The slow emergence and rise of the middle and lower classes (including the
lower kind of spirit and body), of which one finds many preludes before the
French Revolution-and it would have taken place without the Revolution, too-on
the whole, then, the predominance of the herd over all shepherds and
bellwethers- involves

1. eclipse of the spirit (the fusion of a Stoic and a frivolous appearance of
happiness, characteristic of noble cultures, decreases; one lets much suffering
be seen and heard that one formerly bore and hid);

2. moral hypocrisy (a way of wishing to distinguish oneself not by means of
morality, but by means of the herd virtues: pity, consideration, moderation,
which are not recognized and honored outside the herd ability);

3. a really great amount of shared suffering (pity) and joy (the pleasure in
large-scale associations found in all herd animals -"community spirit,"
"Fatherland," everything in which the individual does not count).

61 (Summer-Fall 1883)

Our time, with its aspiration to remedy and prevent accidental distresses and
to wage preventive war against disagreeable possibilities, is a time of the
poor. Our "rich"-are poorest of all. The true purpose of all riches is
forgotten.

The romantic pose of modern man:-the noble man (Byron, Victor Hugo, George
Sand);-noble indignation;-consecration through passion (as true
"nature");-siding with the oppressed and underprivileged: motto of the
historians and novelists;-the Stoics of duty,-selflessness as art and
knowledge,-altruism as the most mendacious form of egoism (utilitarianism), most
sentimental egoism.

All this is eighteenth century. What, on the other hand, has not been
inherited from it: insouciance, cheerfulness, elegance, brightness of the
spirit. The tempo of the spirit has changed; the enjoyment of refinement and
clarity of the spirit has given place to the enjoyment of color, harmony, mass,
reality, etc. Sensualism in matters of the spirit. In short, it is the
eighteenth century of Rousseau.

63 (Jan.-Fall 1888)

On the whole, a tremendous quantum of humaneness has been attained in
present-day mankind. That this is not felt generally is itself a proof: we have
become so sensitive concerning small states of distress that we unjustly ignore
what has been attained.

Here one must make allowance for the existence of much decadence, and seen
with such eyes our world has to look wretched and miserable. But such eyes have
at all times seen the same things:

1. a certain overirritation even of the moral feelings;

2. the quantum of embitterment and eclipse that pessimism carries into
judgments: these two together account for the predominance of the opposite
notion, that our morality is in a bad way.

The fact of credit, of worldwide trade, of the means of transportation-here a
tremendous mild trust in man finds expression.-Another contributing factor
is

3. the emancipation of science from moral and religious purposes: a very good
sign that, however, is usually misunderstood.

In my own way I attempt a just)fication of history.

64 (Spring-Fall 1887)

The second Buddhism. The nihilistic catastrophe that finishes Indian
culture.-Early signs of it: The immense increase of pity. Spiritual weariness.
The reduction of problems to questions of pleasure and displeasure. The war
glory that provokes a counterstroke. Just as national demarcation provokes a
countermovement, the most cordial "fraternity." The impossibility for religion
to go on working with dogmas and fables.

65 (Nov. 1887-March 1888)

What is attacked deep down today is the instinct and the will of tradition:
all institutions that owe their origins to this instinct violate the taste of
the modern spirit.-At bottom, nothing is thought and done without the purpose of
eradicating this sense Eor tradition. One considers tradition a fatality; one
studies it, recognizes it (as "heredity"), but one does not want it. The tensing
of a will over long temporal distances, the selection of the states and
valuations that allow one to dispose of future centuries -precisely this is
antimodern in the highest degree. Which goes to show that it is the
disorganizing principles that give our age its character.

66 (Spring-Fall 1887)

"Be simple!"-for us complicated and elusive triers of the reins a demand that
is a simple stupidity.-Be natural! But how if one happens to be "unnatural"?

67 (1884)

The former means for obtaining homogeneous, enduring characters for long
generations: unalienable landed property, honoring the old (origin of the belief
in gods and heroes as ancestors).

Now the breaking up of landed property belongs to the opposite tendency:
newspapers (in place of daily prayers), railway, telegraph. Centralization of a
tremendous number of different interests in a single soul, which for that reason
must be very strong and protean.

68 (March-lune 1888)

Why everything turns into histrionics.-Modern man lacks: the sure instinct
(consequence of a long homogeneous form of activity of one kind of man); the
inability to achieve anything perfect is merely a consequence of this: as an
individual one can never make up for lost schooling.

That which creates a morality, a code of laws: the profound instinct that
only automatism makes possible perfection in life and creation.

But now we have reached the opposite point; indeed, we wanted to reach it:
the most extreme consciousness, man's ability to see through himself and
history. With this we are practically as far as possible from perfection in
being, doing, and willing: our desire, even our will for knowledge is a symptom
of a tremendous decadence. We strive for the opposite of that which strong
races, strong natures want-understanding is an ending.-

That science is possible in this sense that is cultivated today is proof that
all elementary instincts, life's instincts of self-defense and protection, no
longer function. We no longer collect, we squander the capital of our ancestors,
even in the way in which we seek knowledge.-

69 (1885-1886)Nihilistic Traits

a. In the natural sciences ("meaninglessness"); causalism, mechanism.
"Lawfulness" an entr'acte, a residue.

b. Ditto in politics: one lacks the faith in one's right, innocence;
mendaciousness rules and serving the moment.

c. Ditto in economics: the abolition of slavery. The lack of a redeeming
class, one that just)fies-advent of anarchism. "Education"?

d. Ditto in history: fatalism, Darwinism; the final attempts to read reason
and divinity into it fail. Sentimentality in face of the past; one could not
endure a biography!- (Here, too, phenomenalism: character as a mask; there are
no facts.)

e. Ditto in art: romanticism and its counterstroke (aversion against romantic
ideals and lies). The latter, moral as a sense of greater truthfulness, but
pessimistic. Pure "artists" (indifferent toward content). (Father-confessor
psychology and puritan psychology, two forms of psychological romanticism: but
even its counterproposal, the attempt to adopt a purely artistic attitude toward
man-even there the opposite valuation is not yet ventured!)

70 (1885-1886)

Against the doctrine of the influence of the milieu and external causes: the
force within is infinitely superior; much that looks like external influence is
merely its adaptation from within. The very same milieus can be interpreted and
exploited in opposite ways: there are no facts.-A genius is not explained in
terms of such conditions of his origin.

71 (Spring-Fall 1887; rev. Spring-Fall 1888)

"Modernity" in the perspective of the metaphor of nourishment and
digestion.-

Sensibility immensely more irritable (-dressed up moralistically: the
increase in pity-); the abundance of disparate impressions greater than ever:
cosmopolitanism in foods, literatures, newspapers, forms, tastes, even
landscapes. The tempo of this influx prestissimo; the impressions erase each
other; one instinctively resists taking in anything, taking anything deeply, to
"digest" anything; a weakening of the power to digest results from this. A kind
of adaptation to this flood of impressions takes place: men unlearn spontaneous
action, they merely react to stimuli from outside. They spend their strength
partly in assimilating things, partly in defense, partly in opposition. Profound
weakening of spontaneity: the historian, critic, analyst, the interpreter, the
observer, the collector, the reader-all of them reactive talents -all
science!

Artificial change of one's nature into a "mirror"; interested but, as it
were, merely epidermically interested; a coolness on principle, a balance, a
fixed low temperature closely underneath the thin surface on which warmth,
movement, "tempest," and the play of waves are encountered.

Opposition of external mobility and a certain deep heaviness and
weariness.

72 (lan.-Fall 1888)

Where does our modern world belong-to exhaustion or ascent?-Its manifoldness
and unrest conditioned by the attainment of the highest level of
consciousness.

73 (Spring-Fall 1887)

Overwork, curiosity and sympathy-our modern vices.

74 (Spring-Fall 1887)

Toward a characterization of "modernity."-Overabundant development of
intermediary forms; atrophy of types; traditions break off, schools; the
overlordship of the instincts (prepared philosophically: the unconscious worth
more) after the will power, the willing of end and means, has been weakened.

75 (1885)

An able craftsman or scholar cuts a fine figure when he takes pride in his
art and looks on life content and satisfied. But nothing looks more wretched
than when a shoemaker or schoolmaster gives us to understand with a suffering
mien that he was really born for something better. There is nothing better than
what is good- and good is having some ability and using that to create,
Tuchtigkeit or virtu in the Italian Renaissance sense.

Today, in our time when the state has an absurdly fat stomach, there are in
all fields and departments, in addition to the real workers, also
"representatives"; e.g., besides the scholars also scribblers, besides the
suffering classes also garrulous, boastful peter-do-wells who "represent" this
suffering, not to speak of the professional politicians who are well off while
"representing" distress with powerful lungs before a parliament. Our modern life
is extremely expensive owing to the large number of intermediaries; in an
ancient city, on the other hand, and, echoing that, also in many cities in Spain
and Italy, one appeared oneself and would have given a hoot to such modern
representatives and intermediaries-or a kick!

76 (Spring-Fall 1887)

The predominance of dealers and intermediaries in spiritual matters, too: the
scribbler, the "representative," the historian (who fuses past and present), the
exotician and cosmopolitan, the intermediaries between science and philosophy,
the semitheologians.

77(1883-1888)

Nothing to date has nauseated me more than the parasites of the spirit: in
our unhealthy Europe one already finds them everywhere-and they have the best
conscience in the world. Perhaps a little dim, a little air pessimiste, but in
the main voraclous, dirty, dirtying, creeping in, nestling, thievish, scurvy-and
as innocent as all little sinners and microbes. They live off the fact that
other people have spirit and squander it: they know that it is of the very
essence of the rich spirit to squander itself carelessly, without petty caution,
from day to day.-For the spirit is a bad householder and pays no heed to how
everybody l~ves and feeds on it.

78(1885-1886)Histrionics

The colorfulness of modern man and its charm. Essentially concealment and
satiety.

The scribbler.

The politician (in "the nationalist swindle").

Histrionics in the arts:

lack of probity in prior training and schooling (Fromentin);

the romantics (lack of philosophy and science and superabundance

of literature);

the novelists (Walter Scott, but also the Nibelungen monsters along

with the most nervous music);

the Iyric poets.

Being "scientific."

Virtuosos (Jews).

Popular ideals overcome, but not yet in the eyes of the people: the saint,
the sage, the prophet.

79 (Spring-Fall 1887)

The modern spirit's lack of discipline, dressed up in all sorts of moral
fashions.-The showy words are: tolerance (for "the incapacity for Yes and No");
la largeur de sympathie42 ( = onethird indifference, one-third curiosity,
one-third pathological irritability); "objectivity" (lack of personality, lack
of will, incapacity for "love"); "freedom" versus rules (romanticism); "truth"
versus forgery and lies (naturalism); being "scientific" (the "document
hurnain": in other words, the novel of colportage and addition in place of
composition); "passion" meaning disorder and immoderation; "depth" meaning
confusion, the profuse chaos of symbols.

80 (Nov. 1887-March 1888)

Toward a critique of the big words.-I am full of suspicion and malice against
what they call "ideals": this is my pessimism, to have recognized how the
"higher feelings" are a source of misfortune and man's loss of value.

One is deceived every time one expects "progress" from an ideal; every time
so far the victory of the ideal has meant a retrograde movement.

Christianity, the revolution, the abolition of slavery, equal rights,
philanthropy, love of peace, justice, truth: all these big words have value only
in a fight, as flags: not as realities but as showy words for something quite
different (indeed, opposite!).43

81 (1883-1888)

One knows the kind of human being who has fallen in love with the motto, tout
comprendre c'est tout pardonner. It is the weak, it is above all the
disappointed: if there is something to be forgiven in all, perhaps there is also
something to be despised in all. It is the philosophy of disappointment that
wraps itself so humanely in pity and looks sweet.

These are romantics whose faith flew the coop: now they at least want to
watch how everything passes and goes. They can it l'art pour ['art,
"objectivity," etc.

"Without the Christian faith," Pascal thought, "you, no less than nature and
history, will become for yourselves un monstre et un chaos." This prophecy we
have furfilled, after the feeble-optimistic eighteenth century had prettified
and rationalized man.

Schopenhauer and Pascal.-In an important sense, Schopenhauer is the first to
take up again the movement of Pascal: un rnonstre et un chaos, consequently
something to be negated.- History, nature, man himself.

"Our inability to know the truth is the consequence of our corruption, our
moral decay"; thus Pascal. And thus, at bottom, Schopenhauer. "The deeper the
corruption of reason, the more necessary the doctrine of salvation"-or, in
Schopenhauer's terms, negation.

84 (Spring-Fall 1887)

Schopenhauer as throwback (state before the revolution): Pity, sensuality,
art, weakness of the will, catholicism of spiritual cravings-that is good
eighteenth century au fond.46

Schopenhauer's basic misunderstanding of the will (as if craving, instinct,
drive were the essence of will) is typical: lowering the value of the will to
the point of making a real mistake. Also hatred against willing; attempt to see
something higher, indeed that which is higher and valuable, in willing no more,
in "being a subject without aim and purpose" (in the "pure subject free of
will"). Great symptom of the exhaustion or the weakness of the will: for the
will is precisely that which treats cravings as their master and appoints to
them their way and measure.47

85 (lan.-Fall 1888)

The unworthy attempt has been made to see Wagner and Schopenhauer as types of
mental illness: one would gain an incomparably more essential insight by making
more precise scientifically the type of decadence both represent.

86 (1888)

Your Henrilc Ibsen has become very clear to me. For all his robust idealism
and "will to truth" he did not dare to liberate himself from the illusionism of
morality that speaks of freedom without wishing to admit to itself what freedom
is: the second stage in the metamorphosis of the "will to power"-for those who
lack freedom. On the first stage one demands justice from those who are in
power. On the second, one speaks of "freedom-that IS, one wants to get away from
those in power. On the third, one speaks of "equal rights"-that is, as long as
one has not yet gained superiority one wants to prevent one's competitors from
growing in power.

87 (Spring-Fall 1887)

Decline of Protestantism: understood as a halfway house both theoretically
and historically. Actual superiority of Catholicism; the feeling of
Protestantism extinguished to such an extent that the strongest anti-Protestant
movements are no longer experienced as such (for example, Wagner's Parsifal).
All of the higher regions of the spirit in France are Catholic in their
instincts; Bismarck realizes that Protestantism simply doesn't exist any
more.

88 (Spring-Fall 1887)

Protestantism, that spiritually unclean and boring form of decadence in which
Christianity has been able so far to preserve itself in the mediocre north:
valuable for knowledge as something complex and a halfway house, in so far as it
brought together in the same heads experiences of different orders and
origins.

89 (March-June 1888)

How did the German spirit transform Christianity!-And to stick to
Protestantism: how much beer there is in Protestant Christianity! Can one even
imagine a spiritually staler, lazier, more comfortably relaxed form of the
Christian faith than that of the average Protestant in Germany?

That's what I call a modest version of Christianity! A homoeopathy of
Christianity is what I call it.

One reminds me that today we also encounter an immodest Protestantism-that of
the court chaplains and anti-Semitic speculators: but nobody has claimed yet
that any "spirit" whatever "moved" on the faces of these waters.-That is merely
a more indecet form of Christianity, by no means more sensible.

90 (lan.-Fall 1888)

Progress.-Let us not be deceived! Time marches forward; we'd like to believe
that everything that is in it also marches forward-that the development is one
that moves forward.

The most level-headed are led astray by this illusion. But the nineteenth
century does not represent progress over the sixteenth; and the German spirit of
1888 represents a regress from the German spirit of 1788.

"Mankind" does not advance, it does not even exist. The overall aspect is
that of a tremendous experimental laboratory in which a few successes are
scored, scattered throughout all ages, while there are untold failures, and all
order, logic, union, and obligingness are lacking. How can we fail to recognize
that the ascent of Christianity is a movement of decadence?-That the German
Reformation is a recrudescence of Christian barbarism?-That the Revolution
destroyed the instinct for a grand organization of society?

Man represents no progress over the animal: the civilized tenderfoot is an
abortion compared to the Arab and Corsican; the Chinese is a more successful
type, namely more durable, than the European.

91 (188On German Pessimism

The eclipse, the pessimistic coloring, comes necessarily in the wake of the
Enlightenment. Around 1770 the decline of cheerfulness began to be noticed;
women, with that feminine instinct which always sides with virtue, supposed that
immorality was the cause. Galiani hit the nail on the head: he cites Voltaire's
verse:

Un monstre gai vaut mieux

Qu'un sentimental ennuyeux.

When I believe now that I am a few centuries ahead in Enlightenment not only
of Voltaire but even of Galiani, who was far profounder-how far must I have got
in the increase of darkness!54 And this is really the case, and I bewared in
time, with some sort of regret, of the German and Christian narrowness and
inconsequence of pessimism a la Schopenhauer or, worse, Leopardi, and sought out
the most quintessential forms (Asia) .55 But in order to endure this type of
extreme pessimism (it can be perceived here and there in my Birth of Tragedy)
and to live alone "without God and morality" I had to invent a counterpart for
myself. Perhaps I know best why man alone laughs: he alone suffers so deeply
that he had to invent laughter. The unhappiest and most melancholy animal is, as
fitting, the most cheerful.

92 (1883-1888)

Regarding German culture, I have always had the feeling oi decline. This
fact, that I first became acquainted with a type in decline, has often made me
unfair to the whole phenomenon oi European culture. The Germans always come
after the others, much later: they are carrying something in the depths;
e.g.,-

Renaissance and Reformation.-What does the Renaissance prove? That the reign
of the individual has to be brief. The squandering is too great; the very
possibility of collecting and capitalizing is lacking; and exhaustion follows
immediately. These are times when everything is spent, when the very strength is
spent with which one collects, capitalizes, and piles riches upon riches.- Even
the opponents of such movements are forced into an absurd waste of energy; they,
too, soon become exhausted, spent, desolate.

In the Reformation we possess a wild and vulgar counterpart to the Italian
Renaissance, born of related impulses; only in the retarded north, which had
remained coarse, they had to don a religious disguise; for there the concept of
the higher life had not yet detached itself from that of the religious life.

Through the Reformation, too, the individual sought freedom; "everybody his
own priest" is also a mere formula of libertinage. In truth, one word was
enough-"evangelical freedom"-and all instincts that had reason to remain hidden
broke out like wild dogs, the most brutal requirements suddenly acquired the
courage to face themselves, and everything seemed just)fied.-One was careful not
to understand what liberty one had really meant at bottom; one shut one's eyes
before oneself.-But shutting one's eyes and moistening one's lips with
enthusiastic orations did not prevent one's hands from grasping whatever could
be grabbed, and the belly became the god of the "free evangel," and all the
cravings of revenge and envy satisfied themselves with insatiable rage.-

This took a while; then exhaustion set in, just as it had in the south of
Europe-and here, too, a vulgar kind of exhaustion, a general were in servitium.-
The indecent century of Germany arrived.-

94 (1884)

Chivalry as the conquered position of power: its gradual breaking up (and in
part transition into what is more spread out, bourgeois). In La Rochefoucauld we
find a consciousness of the true motive springs of noblesse of the mind-and a
view of these motive springs that is darkened by Christianity.

The French Revolution as the continuation of Christianity. Rousseau is the
seducer: he again unfetters woman who is henceforth represented in an ever more
interesting manner-as suffering. Then the slaves and Mrs. Beecher- Stowe. Then
the poor and the workers. Then the vice addicts and the sick-all this is moved
into the foreground (even to develop sympathy for the genius one no longer knows
any other way for the past five hundred years than to represent him as the
bearer of great suffering!). Next come the curse on voluptuousness (Baudelaire
and Schopenhauer); the most decided conviction that the lust to rule is the
greatest vice;58 the perfect certainty that morality and disinterestedness are
identical concepts and that the "happiness of all" is a goal worth striving for
(i.e., the kingdom of heaven of Christ). We are well along on the way: the
kingdom of heaven of the poor in spirit has begun.- Intermediary stages: the
bourgeois (a parvenu on account of money) and the worker (on account of the
machine).

Comparison of Greek culture and that of the French in the age of Louis XIV.
Decided faith in oneself. A leisure class whose members make things difficult
for themselves and exercise much self-overcoming. The power of form, the will to
give form to oneself. "Happiness" admitted as a goal. Much strength and energy
behind the emphasis on forms. The delight in looking at a life that seems so
easy.-To the French, the Greeks looked like children.

95 (Spring-Fall 1887)

The Three Centuries

Their different sensibilities are best expressed thus:

Aristocratism: Descartes, rule of reason, testimony of t sovereignty of the
will;

Feminism: Rousseau, rule of feeling, testimony of the sovereignty of the
senses, mendacious;

Animalism: Schopenhauer, rule of craving, testimony of the sovereignty of
animality, more honest but gloomy.

The seventeenth century is aristocratic, imposes order, looks down haughtily
upon the animalic, is severe against the heart, not cozy, without sentiment,
"un-German," averse to what is burlesque and what is natural, inclined to
generalizations and sovereign confronted with the past-for it believes in
itself. Much beast of prey au fond, much ascetic habit to remain master. The
century of strong will; also of strong passion.

The eighteenth century is dominated by woman, given to enthusiasm, full of
esprit, shallow, but with a spirit in the service of what is desirable, of the
heart, libertine in the enjoyment of what is most spiritual, and undermines all
authorities; intoxicated, cheerful, clear, humane, false before itself, much
canaille au fond, sociable.-

The nineteenth century is more animalic and subterranean, uglier, more
realistic and vulgar, and precisely for that reason "better," "more honest,"
more submissive before every kind of "reality," truer; but weak in will, but sad
and full of dark cravings, but fatalistic. Not full of awe and reverence for
either "reason" or "heart"; deeply convinced of the rule of cravings
(Schopenhauer spoke of "will"; but nothing is more characteristic of his
philosophy than the absence of all genuine willing). Even morality reduced to
one instinct ("pity").

Auguste Comte is a continuation of the eighteenth century (domination of
coeur over la te^te, sensualism in the theory of knowledge, altruistic
enthusiasm).

That science has become sovereign to such a degree proves how the nineteenth
century has rid itself of the domination of ideals. A certain frugality of
desire makes possible our scientific curiosity and severity-which is our kind of
virtue.-

Romanticism is an echo of the eighteenth century; a kind of piled-high desire
for its enthusiasm in the grand style (as a matter of fact, a good deal of
histrionics and self-deception: one wanted to represent strong natures and grand
passions).

The nineteenth century looks instinctively for theories that seem to justify
its fatalistic submission to matters of fact. Already Hegel's success against
"sentimentality" and romantic idealism was due to his fatalistic way of
thinking, to his faith in the greater reason on the side of the victorious, to
his just)fication of the actual "state" (in place of "mankind," etc.).-

Schopenhauer: we are something stupid and, at best, even something that
cancels itself. Success of determinism, of the genealogical derivation of
obligations that had formerly been considered absolute, the doctrine of milieu
and adaptation, the reduction of will to reflexes, the denial of the will as an
"efficient cause"; finally-a real rechristening: one sees so little will that
the word becomes free to designate something else. Further theories: the
doctrine of objectivity-"will- less" contemplation-as the only road to truth;
also to beauty (-also the faith in the "genius" to justify a right to
submission); mechanism, the calculable rigidity of the mechanical process; the
alleged "naturalism," elimination of the choosing, judging, interpreting subject
as a principle-

Kant, with his "practical reason" and his moral fanaticism is wholly
eighteenth century; still entirely outside the historical movement; without any
eye for the actuality of his time, e.g., Revolution; untouched by Greek
philosophy; fanciful visionary of the concept of duty; sensualist with the
backdrop of the pampering of dogmatism.-

The movement back to Kant in our century is a movement back to the eighteenth
century: one wants to regain a right to the old ideals and the old
enthusiasm-for that reason an epistemology that "sets boundaries," which means
that it permits one to posit as one may see fit a beyond of reason.-

Hegel's way of thinking is not far different from Goethe's: one needs only to
listen to Goethe about Spinoza. Will to deify the universe and life in order to
find repose and happiness in contemplation and in getting to the bottom of
things; Hegel seeks reason everywhere-before reason one may submit and
acquiesce. In Goethe a kind of almost joyous and trusting fatalism that does not
revolt, that does not flag, that seeks to form a totality out of himself, in the
faith that only in the totality everything redeems itself and appears good and
justified.

96 (Spring-Fall 1887)

Period of the Enlightenment-followed by the period of sentimentalitY. To what
extent Schopenhauer belongs to "sentimentality" (Hegel to spirituality).

97 (Spring-Fall 1887)

The seventeenth century suffers of man as of a sum of contradictions ("I'amas
de contradictions" that we are); it seeks to discover, order, excavate man-while
the eighteenth century seeks to forget what is known of man's nature in order to
assimilate him to its utopia. "Superficial, tender, humane"-enthusiastic about
"man"-

The seventeenth century seeks to erase the tracks of the individual to make
the work look as similar to life as possible. The eighteenth uses the work in an
attempt to arouse interest in the author. The seventeenth century seeks in
art-art, a piece of culture; the eighteenth uses art to make propaganda for
reforms of a social and political nature.

"Utopia," the "ideal man," the de)fication of nature, the vanity of posing,
the subordination to propaganda for social goals, charlatanism-these are our
gifts from the eighteenth century.

The style of the seventeenth century: propre, exact et libre.

The strong individual, self-aufficient or zealously occupied before God-and
this modern obtrusiveness of authors who all but leap out at you-these furnish
some contrast. "To perform" -compare that with the scholars of Port-Royal.

Alfieri had a sense for grand style.

Hatred of the burlesque (undignified), lack of a sense for nature belong to
the seventeenth century.

98 (Spring-Fall 1887)

Against Rousseau.- Unfortunately, man is no longer evil enough; Rousseau's
opponents who say "man is a beast of prey" are unfortunately wrong. Not the
corruption of man but the extent to which he has become tender and moralized is
his curse.

Precisely in the sphere that Rousseau fought most violently one could find
the relatively still strong and well-turned-out type of man (those in whom the
grand affects were still unbroken: will to power, will to enjoyment, will and
capacity to command). The man of the eighteenth century has to be compared with
the man of the Renaissance (also with the man of the seventeenth century in
France), so that one feels what is at stake: Rousseau is a symptom of self
self-contempt and heated vanity-both signs that the domineering will is lacking:
he moralizes and, as a man of rancor, seeks the cause of his wretchedness in the
ruling classes.

99 (Spring-Fall 1887)

Against Rousseau.-The state of nature is terrible, man is a beast of prey;
our civilization represents a tremendous triumph over this beast-of-prey nature:
thus argued Voltaire. He felt the mitigation, the subtleties, the spiritual joys
of the civilized state; he despised narrowmindedness, also in the form of
virtue, and the lack of delicatesse, also among ascetics and monks.

The moral reprehensibility of man seemed to preoccupy

Rousseau; with the words "unjust" and "cruel" one can best stir up the
instincts of the oppressed who otherwise smart under the ban of the vetitum and
disfavor, so their conscience advises them against rebellious cravings. Such
emancipators seek one thing above all: to give their party the grand accents and
poses of the higher nature.

100 (Spring-Fall 1887)

Rousseau: the rule based on feeling; nature as the source of justice; man
perfects himself to the extent to which he approaches nature (according to
Voltaire, to the extent to which he moves away from nature). The very same
epochs are for one ages of the progress of humanity; for the other, times when
injustice and inequality grow worse.

Voltaire still comprehended umanita in the Renaissance sense; also virtu (as
"high culture"); he tights for the cause of the "honnetes gens" and "de la bonne
compagnie,"65 the cause of

taste, of science, of the arts, of progress itself and civilization.

The fight began around 1760: the citizen of Geneva and le seigneur de
Ferney.68 Only from that moment on Voltaire becomes the man of his century, the
philosopher, the representative of tolerance and unbelief (till then merely un
bel esprit).e7 Envy and hatred of Rousseau's success impelled him forward, "to
the heights."

Pour "la canaille" un die u rem unerate ur et vengeur58- Voltaire.

Critique of both points of view in regard to the value of civilization. The
social invention is for Voltaire the most beautiful there is: there is no higher
goal than to maintain and perfect it; precisely this is honnetete,68 to respect
social conventions; virtue as obedience to certain necessary "prejudices" in
favor of the preservation of "society." Missionary of culture, aristocrat,
representative of the victorious, ruling classes and their valuations. But
Rousseau remained a plebeian, also as homme de lettres;70 that was unheard of;
his impudent contempt of all that was not he himself.

What was sick in Rousseau was admired and imitated most. (Lord Byron related
to him; also worked himself up into sublime poses and into vindictive rancor;
sign of "meanness"; later attained balance through Venice and comprehended what
produces more ease and well- being~'insouciance.)71

Rousseau is proud in regard to what he is, in spite of his origins; but he is
beside himself when one reminds him of it.-

Rousseau, beyond a doubt, mentally disturbed; in Voltaire an uncommon health
and light touch. The rancor of the sick; the periods of his insanity also those
of his contempt of man and his mistrust.

The defense of providence by Rousseau (against the pessimism of Voltaire): he
needed God in order to be able to cast a curse upon society and civilization;
everything had to be good in itself because God had created it; only man has
corrupted men. The "good man" as the natural man was pure fantasy; but with the
dogma of God's authorship it seemed probable and well-founded.

Romanticism a la Rousseau: passion ("the sovereign right of passion");
"naturalness"; the fascination of madness (folly included in greatness); the
absurd vanity of the weak man; the rancor of the mob as judge ("for a hundred
years now, a sick man has been accepted as a leader in politics").

101 (Spring-Fall 1887)

Kant: makes the epistemological skepticism of the English possible for
Germans:

1. by enlisting for it the sympathy of the moral and religious needs of the
Germans; just as the later philosophers of the Academy used skepticism for the
same reason, as a preparation for Platonism (vice Augustin); and as Pascal used
even moralistic skepticism in order to excite the need for faith ("to justify
it");

2. by scholastically involuting and curlicueing it and thus making it
acceptable for the German taste regarding scientific form (for Locke and Hume in
themselves were too bright, too clear, i.e., judged according to German value
instincts, "too superficial"-)

Kant: inferior in his psychology and knowledge of human nature; way off when
it comes to great historical values (French Revolution); a moral fanatic a la
Rousseau; a subterranean Christianity in his values; a dogmatist through and
through, but ponderously sick of this inclination, to such an extent that he
wished to tyrannize it, but also weary right away of skepticism; not yet touched
by the slightest breath of cosmopolitan taste and the beauty of antiquity-a
delayer and mediator, nothing original (just as Leibniz mediated and built a
bridge between mechanism and spiritualism, as Goethe did between the taste of
the eighteenth century and that of the "historical sense" (which is essentially
a sense for the exotic), as German music did between French and Italian music,
as Charlemagne did between imperium Romanum and nationalism-delayers par
excellence. ) 73

102 (Spring-Fall 1887)

In how far the Christian centuries with their pessimism were stronger
centuries than the eighteenth century-like the tragic era of the Greeks.

The nineteenth century vis-a-vis the eighteenth century. In what respects
heir-in what respects a regression (poorer in "spirit" and taste)-in what
respects progress (darker,74 more realistic, stronger).

103 (1883-1888)75

What does it mean that we have such a feeling for the campagna Romana? And
for high mountain ranges? What is the meaning of our nationalism?

Chateaubriand in 1803, in a letter to M. de Fontanes, gives the first
impression of the campagna Romana.

Delacroix, too, did not like Rome, it frightened him. He was enthusiastic
about Venice, like Shakespeare, like Byron, like George Sand. This aversion to
Rome also in Theoph. Gautier-and in Rich. Wagner.

-moral and poetical substitutions in Wagner, one art as stopgap for
deficiencies in the others

-the "historical sense," inspiration from poetry and ancient sagas

-that typical transformation of which G. Flaubert offers the clearest example
among the French and Richard Wagner among the Germans, in which the romantic
faith in love and the future is transformed into the desire for the nothing,
1830 into 1850.

106 (Nov. 1887-March 1888)

Why does German music culminate in the period of German

romanticism? Why is Goethe missing in German music? How much Schiller-more
precisely, how much "Thekla"-there is in Beethoven!

Schumann has in himself Eichendorff, Uhland, Heine, Hoffmann, Tieck. Richard
Wagner has Freischutz, Hoffmann, Grimm, the romantic saga, the mystical
catholicism of instinct, symbolism, the "libertinism of passion" (Rousseau's
intent). The Flying Dutchman tastes of France, where le tene'breux was the type
of the seducer in 1830.

Cult of music, of the revolutionary romanticism of form. Wagner sums up
romanticism, German as well as French-

107 (1888)

Estimated merely for his value for Germany and German culture, Richard Wagner
remains a great question mark, perhaps a German misfortune, in any case a
destiny: but what does it matter? Isn't he very much more than merely a German
event? It even seems to me that there is no place where he belongs less than
Germany: nothing was prepared for him there; his whole type remains simply
strange among Germans, odd, uncomprehended, incomprehensible But one is careful
not to admit this to oneself: for that one is too kindly, too square, too
German. "Credo quia absurdus est": that is what the German spirit wants and also
wanted in this case-and so it believes for the present whatever Wagner wanted
people to believe about him. The German spirit has at all times lacked subtlety
and divination in psychologicis. Today, under the high pressure of fatherlandism
and self-admiration, it is visibly thickening and becoming coarser: how should
it be capable of coping with the problem of Wagner!-

108 (1885)

So far, the Germans are nothing, but they will become something; thus they
have no culture yet-thus they cannot have any culture yet. That is my
proposition: let those who cannot help it take offense.-So far they are nothing:
that means, they are all sorts of things. They will become something: that
means, they will stop some day being all sorts of things. The latter is at
bottom a mere wish, scarcely a hope; fortunately, a wish on which one can live,
a matter of will, of work, of discipline, of breeding, as well as a matter of
annoyance, of desire, of missing something, of discomfort, even of
embitterment-in brief, we Germans desire something from ourselves that has not
yet been desired from us-we desire something more!

That this "German as he is not yet" deserves something better than today's
German "Bildung"; that all who are "in the process of becoming" must be furious
when they perceive some satisfaction in this area, an impertinent "retiring on
one's laurels" or "selfcongratulation": that is my second proposition on which I
also have not yet changed my mind.

109 (1885)

Principle: There is an element of decay in everything that characterizes
modern man: but close beside this sickness stand signs of an untested force and
powerfulness of the soul. The same reasons that produce the increasing smallness
of man drive the stronger and rarer individuals up to greatness.

110 (Spring-Fall 1887)

Overall insight: the ambiguous character of our modern world _the very same
symptoms could point to decline and to strength. And the signs of strength, of
the attainment of majority, could be misconstrued as weakness on the basis of
traditional (residual) negative emotional valuations. In brief, our feelings, as
feelings about values, are not up to date.

To generalize: feelings about values are always behind the times; they
express conditions of preservation and growth that belong to times long gone by;
they resist new conditions of existence with which they cannot cope and which
they necessarily misunderstand: thus they inhibit and arouse suspicion against
what is new.-

111 (Spring-Fall 1887)

The problem of the nineteenth century. Whether its strong and weak sides
belong together? Whether it is all of one piece? Whether the diverseness of its
ideals and their mutual inconsistency are due to a higher aim: as something
higher.'-For it could be the precondition of greatness to grow to such an extent
in violent tension. Dissatisfaction, nihilism could be a good sign.

112 (Spring-Fall 1887)

Overall insight.-Actually, every major growth is accompanied by a tremendous
crumbling and passing away: suffering, the symptoms of decline belong in the
times of tremendous advances; every fruitful and powerful movement of humanity
has also created at the same time a nihilistic movement. It could be the sign of
a crucial and most essential growth, of the transition to new conditions of
existence, that the most extreme form of pessimism, genuine nihilism, would come
into the world. This I have comprehended.

113 (1883-1888)

( A )

To begin with a full and cordial tribute to contemporary humanity: not to be
deceived by appearances-this type of humanity is less striking but gives far
better warranties of duration; its tempo is slower, but the beat is much richer.
Health is increasing, the actual conditions for a strong body get recognized and
are slowly created, "asceticism" ironice. One shrinks from extremes; a certain
confidence in the "right road''; no enthusing; temporary acclimatization to
narrower values (like "fatherland," like "scholarship," etc.).

Still, this whole picture would remain ambiguous: it could be an ascending
but also a descending movement of life.

( B )

Faith in "progress"-in the lower spheres of intelligence it appears as
ascending life; but this is self-deception; in the higher spheres of
intelligence as decending life.

Description of the symptoms.

Unity of point of view: uncertainty about standards of value. Fear of a
general "in vain." Nihilism.

114 (June 10,1887)82

Actually, we have no longer such need of an antidote to the first nihilism:
life in our Europe is no longer that uncertain, capricious, absurd. Such a
tremendous increase in the value of man, the value of trouble, etc., is not so
needful now; we can take a significant decrease of this value, we may concede
much absurdity and caprice: the power man has attained now permits a demotion of
the means of breeding of which the moral interpretation was the strongest.
"God"' is far too extreme a hypothesis.

115 (Jan.-Fall 1888)

If anything sign)fies our humanization-a genuine and actual progress-it is
the fact that we no longer require excessive oppositions, indeed no opposites at
all- we may love the senses, we have spiritualized and made them artistic in
every degree; we have a right to all those things which were most maligned until
now."

116 (Jan.-Fall 1888)

The inversion of the order of rank.-The pious counterfeiters, the priests,
among us become chandalas-they replace the charlatans, quacks, counterfeiters,
and wizards; we consider them corrupters of the will, great slanderers of life
on which they wish to revenge themselves, rebels among the underprivileged. We
have turned the caste of senants, the Sudras, into our middle class, our "Volk"
["people"], those who make political decisions.f~4

On the other hand, the chandala of former times is at the top: foremost,
those who blaspheme God, the immoralists, the nomads of every type, the artists,
Jews, musicians-at bottom, all disreputable classes of men-

We have raised ourselves to the level of honorable thoughts; even more, we
determine honor on earth, "nobility"-All of us are today advocates of life.-We
immoralists are today the strongest power: the other great powers need us-we
construe the world in our image-

We have transferred the concept of the "chandala" to the priests, teachers of
a beyond, and the Christian society that is grown together with them, as well as
all who are of the same origin, the pessimists, nihilists, romantics of pity,
criminals, vice addicts- the whole sphere in which the concept of "God" is
imagined as a savior-

We are proud of no longer having to be liars, slanderers, men who cast
suspicion on life-

117 (Spring-Fall 1887)

Progress of the nineteenth century against the eighteenth (-at bottom we good
Europeans wage a war against the eighteenth century-):

1. "Return to nature" understood more and more decisively in the opposite
sense from Rousseau's. Away from idyl and opera!

2. more and more decisively anti-idealistic, more concrete, more fearless,
industrious, moderate, suspicious against sudden changes, antirevolutionary;

3. more and more decisively the question concerning the health of the body is
put ahead of that of "the soul": the latter being understood as a state
consequent upon the former, and the former at the very least as a precondition
of the health of the soul.

118 (1883-1888)

If anything at all has been achieved, it is a more innocuous relation to the
senses, a more joyous, benevolent, Goethean attitude toward sensuality; also a
prouder feeling regarding the search for knowledge, so that the "pure fool" is
not given much credit.

119 (Spring-Fall 1887; rev. 1888)

We who are "objective."-It is not "pity" that opens the gates to the most
distant and strange types of being and culture to us, but rather our
accessibility and lack of partiality that does not empathize with or share
suffering but on the contrary takes delight in a hundred things that formerly
led people to suffer (feel outraged or deeply moved, or prompted hostile and
cold looks-). Suffering in all its nuances has become interesting for us: in
this respect we are certainly not fuller of pity, even when we are shaken by the
sight of suffering and moved to tears: we do not by any means for that reason
feel like helping.

In this voluntary desire to contemplate all sorts of distress and
transgressions aa we have become stronger and more vigorous than the eighteenth
century was; it is a proof of our increase in vigor (we have come closer to the
seventeenth and sixteenth centuries-). But it is a profound misunderstanding to
construe our "romanticism" as a proof that our "souls" have become "more
beautiful"-

We desire strong sensations as all coarser ages and social strata do.-This
should be distinguished from the needs of those with weak nerves and the
decadents: they have a need for pepper, even for cruelty-

All of us seek states in which bourgeois morality no longer has any say, and
priestly morality even less (-every book to which some of the air of pastors and
theologians still clings gives us the impression of a pitiable niaiserie and
poverty.-"Good society" consists of those whom at bottom nothing interests
except what is forbidden in bourgeois society and gives a bad reputation: the
same applies to books, music, politics, and the estimation of woman.

120 (Spririg-Fall 1887)

How man has become more natural in the nineteenth century (the eighteenth
century is that of elegance, refinement, and sentiments genereux).-Not "return
to nature"-for there has never yet been a natural humanity. The scholasticism of
un- and antinatural values is the rule, is the beginning; man reaches nature
only after a long struggle-he never "returns"-Nature: i.e., daring to be immoral
like nature.

We are coarser, more direct, full of irony against generous feelings even
when we succumb to them.

More natural is our first society, that of the rich, the leisure class: they
hunt each other, love between the sexes is a kind of sport in which marriage
furnishes an obstacle and a provocation; they amuse themselves and live for
pleasure; they esteem physical advantages above all, are curious and bold.

More natural is our attitude to the search for knowledge: we possess
libertinage of the spirit in all innocence, we hate pompous and hieratical
manners, we delight in what is most forbidden, we should hardly know any longer
of any interest of knowledge if the way to it were paved with boredom.

More natural is our attitude toward morality. Principles have become
ridiculous; nobody permits himself any longer to speak without irony of his
"duty." But a helpful, benevolent disposition is esteemed (morality is found in
an instinct, and the rest is spurned.l°l In addition a few concepts of points of
honor-).

More natural is our position in politicis: we see problems of power, of one
quantum of power against another. We do not believe in any right that is not
supported by the power of enforcement: we feel all rights to be conquests.

More natural is our estimation of great human beings and great things: we
consider passion a privilege, we consider nothing great unless it includes a
great crime; we conceive all being-great as a placing-oneself-outside as far as
morality is concerned.

More natural is our attitude toward nature: we no longer love it on account
of its "innocence," "reason," or "beauty"; we have made it nicely "devilish" and
"dumb." But instead of despising it on that account, we have felt more closely
related to it ever since, more at home in it. It does not aspire to virtue, and
for that we respect nature.

In summa: there are signs that the European of the nineteenth century is less
ashamed of his instincts; he has taken a goodly step toward admitting to himself
his unconditional naturalness, i.e., his immorality, without becoming
embittered-on the contrary, strong enough to endure only this sight.

This sounds to some ears as if corruption had progressed- and it is certain
that man has not come dose to that "nature" of which Rousseau speaks but has
progressed another step in civilization, which Rousseau abhorred. We have become
stronger: we have again come closer to the seventeenth century, especially to
the taste of its end (Dancourt, Lesage, Regnard).

121 (1888)

Culture contra civilization.-The high points of culture and civilization do
not coincide: one should not be deceived about the abysmal antagonism of culture
and civilization. The great moments of culture were always, morally speaking,
times of corruption; and conversely, the periods when the taming of the human
animal ("civilization") was desired and enforced were times of intolerance
against the boldest and most spiritual natures. Civihzation has aims different
from those of culture-perhaps they are even opposite-

122 (January-Fall 1888)

What I warn against: the instincts of decadence should not be confused with
hurnaneness;104 the means of civilization, which lead to disintegration and
necessarily to decadence, should not be confused with culture; the libertinage,
the principle of "laisser aller," should not be confused with the will to power
(-which is the counterprinciple).

123 (Spring-Fall 1887)

The unfinished problems I pose anew: the problem of civilization, the fight
between Rousseau and Voltaire around 1760. Man becomes more profound,
mistrustful, "immoral," stronger, more confident of himself-and to this extent
"more natural": this is "progress."-At the same time, in accordance with a kind
of division of labor, the strata that have become more evil are separated from
those that have become milder and tamer-so that the overall fact is not noticed
immediately.-It is characteristic of strength, of the self-control and
fascination of strength, that these stronger strata possess the art of making
others experience their progress in evil as something higher. It is
characteristic of every "progress" that the strengthened elements are
reinterpreted as "good."

124 (Spring-Fall 1887)

To give men back the courage to their natural drives-

To check their self-underestimation (not that of man as an individual but
that of man as nature-)-

To remove antitheses from things after comprehending that we have projected
them there-

Progress toward "naturalness": in all political questions, also in the
relations of parties, even of commercial, workers', and employers' parties,
questions of power are at stake-"what one can do," and only after that what one
ought to do.

125 (1885)l

Socialism-as the logical conclusion of the tyranny of the least and the
dumbest, i.e., those who are superficial, envious, and three-quarters actors-is
indeed entailed by "modern ideas" and their latent anarchism; but in the tepid
air of democratic well-being the capacity to reach conclusions, or to finish,
weakens. One follows -but one no longer sees what follows. Therefore socialism
is on the whole a hopeless and sour affair; and nothing offers a more amusing
spectacle than the contrast between the poisonous and desperate faces cut by
today's socialists-and to what wretched and pinched feelings their style bears
witness!-and the harmless lambs' happiness of their hopes and desiderata.
Nevertheless, in many places in Europe they may yet bring off occasional coups
and attacks: there will be deep "rumblings" in the stomach of the next century,
and the Paris commune, which has its apologists and advocates in Germany, too,
was perhaps no more than a minor indigestion compared to what is coming. But
there will always be too many who have possessions for socialism to signify more
than an attack of sickness-and those who have possessions are of one mind on one
article of faith: "one must possess something in order to be something." But
this is the oldest and healthiest of all instincts: I should add, "one must want
to have more than one has in order to become more." For this is the doctrine
preached by life itself to all that has life: the morality of development. To
have and to want to have more-growth, in one word-that is life itself. In the
doctrine of socialism there is hidden, rather badly, a "will to negate life";
the human beings or races that think up such a doctrine must be bungled. Indeed,
I should wish that a few great experiments might prove that in a socialist
society life negates itself, cuts off its own roots. The earth is large enough
and man still sufficiently unexhausted; hence such a practical instruction and
demonstratio ad absurdum would not strike me as undesirable, even if it were
gained and paid for with a tremendous expenditure of human lives. In any case,
even as a restless mole under the soil of a society that wallows in stupidity,
socialism will be able to be something useful and therapeutic: it delays "peace
on earth" and the total mollification of the democratic herd animal; it forces
the Europeans to retain spirit, namely cunning and cautious care, not to abjure
manly and warlike virtues altogether, and to retain some remnant of spirit, of
clarity, sobriety, and coldness of the spirit- it protects Europe for the time
being from the marasmusl07 femininus that threatens it.

126 (Spring-Fall 1887)

The most favorable inhibitions and remedies of modernity:

1. universal military service with real wars in which the time for joking is
past;

6. military severity in the demand for and handling of one's"obligations"
(one does not praise any more-).

127 (1884)

I am glad about the military development of Europe; also of the internal
states of anarchy: the time of repose and Chinese ossification, which Galiani
predicted for this century, is over. Personal manly virtu,l virtu of the body,
is regaining value, estimation becomes more physical, nutrition meatier.
Beautiful men are again becoming possible. Pallid hypocrisy (with mandarins at
the top, as Comte dreamed) is over. The barbarian in each of us is affirmed;
also the wild beast. Precisely for that reason philosophers have a future.-Kant
is a scarecrow, some day!ll°

128 (1884)

I have as yet found no reason for discouragement. Whoever has preserved, and
bred in himself, a strong will, together with an ample spirit, has more
favorable opportunities than ever. For the trainability of men has become very
great in this democratic Europe; men who learn easily and adapt themselves
easily are the rule: the herd animal, even highly intelligent, has been
prepared. Whoever can command finds those who must obey: I am thinking, e.g., of
Napoleon and Bismarck. The rivalry with strong and unintelligent wills, which is
the greatest obstacle, is small. Who doesn't topple these "objective" gentlemen
with weak wills, like Ranlce or Renan!

129 (1885)

Spiritual enlightenment is an infallible means for making men unsure, weaker
in will, so they are more in need of company and support-in short, for
developing the herd animal in man. Therefore all great artists of government so
far (Confucius in China, the imperium Romanum, Napoleon, the papacy at the time
when it took an interest in power and not merely in the world), in the places
where the dominant instincts have culminated so far, also employed spiritual
enlightenment-at least let it have its way (like the popes of the Renaissance).
The self-deception of the mass concerning this point, e.g., in every democracy,
is extremely valuable: making men smaller and more governable is desired as
"progress"!

130 (1883-1888)

The highest equity and mildness as a state of weakening (the New Testament
and the original Christian community-apparent as complete betisel in the
Englishmen, Darwin and Wallace). Your equity, you higher natures, impels you
toward suffrage universel, etc.; your "humanity," toward mildness confronted
with crime and stupidity. In the long run you thus make stupidity and the
unscrupulous victorious: comfort and stupidity-the mean.

Externally: age of tremendous wars, upheavals, explosions.

Internally: ever greater weakness of man, events as excitants. The Parisian
as the European extreme.

Consequences: (1) barbarians (at first, of course, below the form of culture
so far [e.g., Duhring]); (2) sovereign individuals (where masses of barbarian
force are crossed with a lack of all restraint regarding whatever has been). Age
of the greatest stupidity, brutality, and the masses, and of the highest
individuals.

131 (1884)

Innumerable individuals of a higher type now perish: but whoever gets away is
strong as the devil. Similar to the situation at the time of the
Renaissance.

132 (1885)

Good Europeans that we are-what distinguishes us above the men of
fatherlands?-First, we are atheists and immoralists, but for the present we
support the religions and moralities of the herd instinct: for these prepare a
type of man that must one day fall into our hands, that must desire our
hands.

Beyond good and evil-but we demand that herd morality should be held sacred
unconditionally.

We hold in reserve many types of philosophy which need to be taught:
possibly, the pessimistic type, as a hammer; a European Buddhism might perhaps
be indispensable.

We probably support the development and maturing of democratic institutions:
they enhance weakness of the will: in socialism we see a thorn that protects
against comfortableness.

Position toward peoples. Our preferences; we pay attention to the results of
interbreeding.

Apart, wealthy, strong: irony at the expense of the "press" and its culture.
Worry lest scholars become journalistic. We feel contemptuous of every kind of
culture that is compatible with reading, not to speak of writing for,
newspapers.

We take our accidental positions (like Goethe, Stendhal), our experiences, as
foreground and stress them to deceive about our depths. We ourselves are waiting
and beware of staking our hearts on them. They serve us as hostels for a night,
which a wanderer needs and accepts-we beware of settling down.

We are ahead of our fellow men in possessing a disciplina voluntaris. All
strength applied to development of strength of the will, an art that permits us
to wear masks, an art of understanding beyond the affects (also to think in a
"supra-European" way, at times).

Preparation for becoming the legislators of the future, the masters of the
earth, at least our children. Basic concern with marriages.

A tremendous stock-taking' after the most terrible earth quake: with new
questions.

134 (1885-1886)

This is the time of the great noon, of the most terrible clearing up: my type
of pessimism-great point of departure.

I. Basic contradiction in civilization and the enhancement of man.

II. Moral valuations as a history of lies and the art of slander in the
service of a will to power (the herd will that rebels against the human beings
who are stronger).

III. The conditions of every enhancement of culture (making possible a
selection at the expense of a mass) are the conditions of all growth.

IV. The multiple ambiguity of the world as a question of strength that sees
all things in the perspective of its growth. Moral-Christian value judgments as
slaves' rebellion and slaves' mendaciousness (against the aristocratic values of
the ancient world). How far does art reach down into the essence of
strength?